Finding Meaning

Posted on May 4, 2007 by E
Filed Under How It Was Done |

Richard Linklater’s 2001 cinematic experiment Waking Life had a profound impact on me, not so much because of the content of the film as for the style in which that content was delivered. Bob Sabiston’s superfreaky animation software that caused the characters to bob and weave while spouting dialogue I didn’t always understand left me mesmerized by what low grade miniDV footage had been transformed into.

The proof of a work’s impact upon me can be gauged best by how badly I end up wanting to make something like it of my own - to learn, to see if I can, to understand how it works. A lot of what I’ve learnt about design and filmmaking, I’ve learnt from practice.

So without really knowing what it meant to generate even a minute of such work (hundreds of hours of rather boring work), I set out to make Meaning, a short experiment in shooting digitally and drawing over the edited footage a la Waking Life (and now A Scanner Darkly).

It was painful work, L and I persevered for all of three days before I gave up. It just sat there for several months and then I gave it another shot. Nothing in this film is anywhere nearly as ambitious as either Linklater project or any of Sabiston’s experiments but it was very satisfactory to finally lay eyes upon the finished effort.

Now, for the first time ever, it’s available to view online. And hey, it got me into the Berlinale Talent Campus so all that effort was not wasted.

   

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